International Search Engine Optimization

International Search Engine Optimization (International SEO) is the process of making sure that search engines can discover, index and understand the relationship between regional or language versions of a page or website. Some sites are both multi-regional and multilingual.

Expanding a website to cover multiple countries and/or languages can be challenging. Because you have multiple versions of your site, any issues will be multiplied, so make sure you test your original site as thoroughly as possible and make sure you have the appropriate infrastructure to handle these sites. Following are some guidelines and best practices for creating multilingual and/or multi-regional sites.

Google has approximately 69.89% of the market share of the world's desktop searches[1] and 95.37% market share of the world's mobile and tablet searches[2]. Google is also the leading search engine in most countries around the world[3]. For most countries, Google will therefore be the primary search engine to target for International SEO. Google is not the market leader however in countries such as China, Russia and South Korea[3].

Google only uses the visible content of a page to determine its language and does not use any code-level language information such as the lang attribute[4]. As such a page should use a single language for content and navigational links[4]. Additionally, automatically translated versions of a page should be avoided as they do not always make sense and can be viewed as spam by Google[4]. If automatically translated versions of a page exist, they should be blocked from crawling by using the robots.txt file[4].

Each language or regional version of a page should have it's own unique URL[4]. Cookies or a users geolocation should not be used to show a translated version of a page or to redirect users to another page[4]. The reason for this is to allow users to access other versions of a page if they choose to and also to ensure that search engines (which may have a geolocation set) can access and index all pages[4]. Cross-linking language and regional versions of page is recommended to allow users to navigate to their desired version of a page in a single click[4].

The URL of a webpage can signal to users the language and the relevant region of the page[4]. For instance https://www.example.ca/fr/page1 clearly indicates French language content relavent to Canada. Whilst it is is okay to use translated words in a URL, ensure that you use UTF-8 encoded characters.

The are a number of different URL structures available that makes it easy to geotarget parts of a site to different regions. Google provides the following table which outlines the pros and cons of each option available[4].

URL Structure

Example

Pros

Cons

Country-specific

example.ie

Clear geotargeting

Server location irrelevant

Easy separation of sites

Expensive (can have limited availability)

Requires more infrastructure

Strict ccTLD requirements (sometimes)

Subdomains with gTLDS

de.example.com

Easy to set up

Can use Search Console geotargeting

Allows different server locations

Easy separation of sites

Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?) language or country?)

Many ccTLDs are tied to a specific country (for example .de for germany or .cn for Germany) and these provide strong signals to users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a specific country[4]. There are however some vanity ccTLDS that Google sees as being more generic than country-targeted and therefore are not used to signal a target country[4]. See a full list of domains Google treats as generic.

For sites that use a generic top-level domain names such as .com, Google allows webmaster to manually geo target their site to a specific region[4]. For ccTLDs recognised by Google as being tied to a specific country, geo targeting in Search Console is not possible as the TLD is already geotargeted.

To geo target a domain in Search Console, go to Search Traffic > International Targeting > Select the country tab > select the target country from the dropdown menu > click Save

If a site uses a generic TLD and serves content to more than one country, it is possible to geotarget individual subdirectories or subdomains by creating separate Search Console accounts for each subdirectory or subdomain.

The location of the server hosting a website is often physically near the site's users and as such Google can use the server's location (through the IP address of the server) as a signal about a site’s intended audience[4]. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better web server infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal[4].

Hreflang tags are used to annotate a page and to indicate the location of the equivalent language or regional version of that page[5]. Using hreflang tags helps ensure that the correct language or regional URL is served in search results[5].

Each language/region page should identify all other language/region equivalents and should reference the itself[5]. The code on each language/region version of a page should therefore be the same (If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A)[5].

Hreflang tags must indicate a language but can optionally reference a region as well[5].. Hreflang markup can not indicate a region without defining a region[5].

Be sure to specify the xhtml namespace as follows: xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"[6]

You must create a separate url element for each URL. Each url element must include a loc tag indicating the page URLs, and an xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="XX" subelement for every alternate version of the page, including itself[6].

For a site with a separate URL for mobile configuration, hreflang markup should be implemented so that mobile pages reference the alternative mobile language/region pages and the desktop pages should reference the alternative desktop language/region pages[7].

The Geo-Targeting feature allows you to provide Bing with hints about the intended audience for your website (or a section of your site) by connecting it to a country[8]. Whereas other Webmaster Tools let you do this only at the site level, the Bing Geo-Targeting feature allows you to define a country audience for an entire domain, subdomain, directory or single page level[8].

To use the geo-targeting feature, In Bing Webmaster Tools on the left hand panel go to Configure My Site > Geo-Targeting. From the drop-down menu, select the URL type (domain, subdomain, directory or page) to geo-target, enter the URL that corresponds to the URL type, select the country from the country/region drop-down menu and click Submit.